The Hearings Are Over, Let the Battles Begin
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16 responses to “The Hearings Are Over, Let the Battles Begin”
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Once again, it is proven that one can actually write a blog post about something without using culture war words and phrases like “virtue signaling”, “critical race theory”, and “woke”.
Refreshing and takes me back to the earlier days of BR.
thank you! thank you! thank you!
The part about hiring is disturbing especially when some do not seem to care why a candidate has left his/her previous police employment.
Similarly the part about desertification seems to be a bit on the loosey-goosey side – i.e. the word and concept, yes, but specifics – standards, eh, maybe let the police decide on an Ad Hoc basis?
I have a suggestion – make these two functions the responsibility of a Civilian board. Let THEM decide if they want to hire someone who had to leave another department under a cloud… and let THEM decide on what basis decertification is applied.
Finally, have Police Review Boards – directly elected and accountable to voters not the Police and not the Mayor or County executive.
Let that board decide who citizens want to be police in their community.
Let those boards define what “bad cop” means or not.
Right now, we have a system where the police are basically responsible for their own accountability – an inherently incestuous realm.
And thanks again, I know when I begin reading a blog post – the substantive character it will have as soon as I see the author.
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The idea of having the citizen review boards be elective is an interesting one.
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Excellent summary, Dick! You’ve brought up many issues worth chewing over. A few random thoughts.
Body cameras — everybody, even me, likes the idea of body cameras. But there is a major cost issue associated with archiving, indexing and retrieving all that footageit. The cost issue would need to be addressed. I wonder if it would be possible for local law enforcement to create a collaborative venture (with or without the participation of the state) to create an economical and functional cloud-based solution.
Choke holds — as a former practitioner of the martial arts, I’m kind of a fan of choke holds. We’ve seen how they can be abused. But what non-lethal alternatives are there in certain circumstances? Will that alternative means of restraint be any safer and less subject to abuse? My gut tells me people are recoiling from the George Floyd tragedy without thinking things through.
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I’d rather be choked out than shot.
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In Fairfax they are saying our arrests of Blacks are much greater ratio than the population here. But my perception has always been that we get a lot of crime from outside the County (eg; Maryland) so I am not sure how to interpret the data without more data re: state/county of residence.
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They are wrong to compare arrests of Blacks to their ratio in the population, as Delegate Don Scott does in his pinned Tweet, where he complains that over half of Virginia’s prison inmates are Black.
Bias is not shown by a group being arrested at a higher rate than its percentage of the population. Every police department in America arrests men at a higher rate than women, compared to men’s percentage of the population. That’s not due mostly to gender bias.
And almost every police department arrests Asians at a lower rate, and Blacks at a higher rate, than they arrest whites. These differences reflect differences in the crime rate, not — for the most part — police racism. (That doesn’t mean racism doesn’t exist. For example, there is racism in police stops, as exemplified by what happened to Dick Hall-Sizemore’s black friend. But racism is not the primary reason for different arrest or incarceration rates).
As the American Journal of Preventive Medicine pointed out, “Homicide rates have consistently been at least ten times higher for blacks aged 10-34 years compared with whites in the same age group between 1995 and 2015.”
See https://www.ajpmonline.org/article/S0749-3797(18)31907-X/pdfMost of the victims of these homicides are other Black people. 89% of all Black homicide victims are killed by other Black people. So reducing the Black incarceration rate for homicide would harm Black people most.
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In my mind, the pretext stop is a very important issue. Watch any reality crime show on Discovery ID and other similar channels. So often, the police are able to gain custody of a suspect through a traffic stop. In 99% of these cases, they really are pretext stops. The police don’t care about the broken tail light; they want the suspect of the burglary, assault or murder.
There are arguments on both sides. It seems more blacks are stopped for pretext offenses than are whites based on a percentage basis. That bothers me. It can result in harassment.
Yet, at the same time, if the police have a tip that a person wanted for murder has been reported driving a blue Buick with a partial plate ID of “ABC 5” and an officer sees such as car that also has a broken tail light, don’t we want the stop to be made irrespective of the driver’s race or gender?
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In your example, the traffic stop would not be for the broken tail light, but based on the description of the suspect’s car. I may be wrong, but I think that would be reasonable cause for the traffic stop.
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A bit off-topic, but do you happen to know whether your friend consented to the searches of his vehicle?
I have declined a police officer’s request to search my vehicle on several occasions. Most of them accepted my “no” and we moved on to other business. Only one of them ever made a big deal out of my [polite] refusal. That one got angry and told me he could “go get a warrant if I refused to cooperate”. My response was to hold out my car keys to him and politely say: “That will be fine. Here are my keys. I’ll wait here while you go get a warrant”. He grumpily gave up at that point and let me leave – without even issuing the speeding ticket he had promised me when he first pulled me over.
Just because they ASK to search your vehicle does not mean you have to consent to it.
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Most folks don’t know what you knew Wayne and they are cowed and intimidated.
I consider that behavior on the police part as tantamount to intimidation and abuse… and the thing is – if there is ANYTHING in the car – such as alcohol or pot or even a “weapon” it can then become the basis for an arrest.
This kind of thing is wrong.
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Good point Larry. Is it even beneficial to society for those things in a vehicle to be illegal based on the topic at hand?
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No… if broken taillights are used as the pretext for searches – I don’t think it’s good policing. You end up alienating the community where you do this. It’s pretty much the same as stop & frisk.
what you gain in crime fighting you lose in community trust and cooperation.
If police did that in upscale neighborhoods – all hell would break loose.
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I think you missed my point. Should broken tail lights be illegal if such piddly things result in these types of interactions? Does the threat that broken tail lights, drug possession, etc have on society in general outweigh the risk of creating more opportunities for potential high stress interactions between the police and citizens? I’m saying that while broken tail lights may be a risk to public safety, enforcing that law may have a greater risk.
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Well no. We still should have parking tickets and speeding tickets and stops for headlight/tailights as warnings or tickets – but none should be commonly used as pretexts for searches that then escalate to arrests and funneling into the criminal justice system.
We need to keep stats on these kinds of stops and searches – in terms of what for, who, what cops, etc.. to tell us all if there are patterns. Post them online weekly – elevate the visibility of the tactics.
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I just don’t think we can have this cake and eat it too. Every interaction between law enforcement and a citizen is a potential life and death situation. Cops are constantly worried that the “perp” is going to pull a gun and shoot them. Many citizens feel that the cop won’t give them a fair shake. I think part of the solution to criminal justice reform is that we take a serious look at all of these piddly laws and evaluate which of these are worth the lives of our citizens and police officers to enforce. There is no way that we can legislate cops to not be nervous or citizens to peacefully comply when stopped by police. We need to make sure that when something goes bad during a stop (because we can’t prohibit this from happening despite our best efforts), that we don’t regret it because the law being enforced wasn’t worth that outcome. I’m not saying to get rid of all laws, but that we carefully conduct a cost/benefit analysis of these laws and jettison any that are not worth human lives for our society to enforce.
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I think TMT makes an important point. These kinds of traffic stops are very much akin to “stop & frisk” policies.
I think Fred MAY have a point. But I would want to see the numbers of arrests for drugs verses violent crimes.
People that do not graduate from high school or do so with minimal literacy end up in the economy trying to get and hold a job – and if they drift into drugs – they inevitably end up also involved in criminal enterprises that – just like during prohibition – end up killing each other.
If we went back to the days when the Mafia reined, and we characterized crime in terms of ethnicity – would we have found out that “Italians” were more inclined to crime and killing each other?
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